On a scale from 1 to 10, how disturbing is that memory?

Seven.

And on a scale from 1 to 7, how much do you believe that there’s something wrong with you?

Five.

The point of EMDR is to close your eyes and see where your thoughts carry you, where one picture in your mind means a million different things and a million different pathways to doors you forgot you had left behind and suddenly they are all blown open with the wind generated by let’s see what you notice from there where you feel your heartbeat in your right ankle and the blood rushing in your left arm and somehow the words keep coming and coming and  

But like, hear me out: could all of my memories be like twos? Or threes? Is that a good baseline?

How do you quantify that? It wasn’t like I hadn’t dealt with trauma– fuck, the last two times I was here I had no idea just how much I had repressed that shit– but it also wasn’t like my life was perfect otherwise. 

When I was walking home at 2 am in the quad I suddenly thought that everything could end if the wrong person saw a strange brown man holding something other than gummy worms in his pocket. 

That didn’t traumatize me. 

No single thing had shocked me into that basic fact. It was just a fact that I had come to realize. 

I don’t do well with others and I know that’s my anxiety talking but I never did understand why I felt weird bringing people back home. I’m sure Mom would gladly set out food for any one of my friends who I wanted to hang out with. They didn’t know my friends existed; they were just names that I would come up with at the top of my head if they pressed.

Why did I always go to their apartments?

I’ve always been afraid of asking for my own space because I felt bad when I considered telling people I didn’t fall into the boxes that they had cut out for me. If the only thing that mattered was how people saw me, why did my perception and theirs fail to align? 

I can only control myself to change.

It felt like I’d never get here. The whole point of everything I did was to get here. And it would have been by my hand.

Or by his. I wasn’t okay with that loss of control, but I knew what it felt like. And by definition, I couldn’t do anything about it. 

The beads that dug into my right palm twirled, stretched, tangled, looped, untangled, and twisted in my grasp. It was better than my fingernails biting into my own skin. 

On a scale from 1 to 10, how disturbing is that memory now?

Eight. 

Process Notes:

This was a particularly hard writing assignment to do, because I wasn’t sure what I could connect my topic to that had a STEM focus; I ended up choosing my therapy session, which I saw Sofia also did. I like what I did with incorporating things said in session next to what hasn’t been said (which is a weird concept to begin with, because the idea of therapy is that there shouldn’t be a lot unsaid), but I don’t know if I connect the thoughts together well enough. I’m also on the fence about if I should have tried to take a more objective line of speaking; I like how it sounds though. It sounds like me.